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Cliff Vandercave
Cliff Vandercave is the main antagonist of the 1994 film by Universal Pictures adaptation of The Flintstones, a live action film version of the animated sitcom of the same name. He is the executive vice president of industrial procurement for Slate & Co. He is assisted by a woman named Sharon Stone. He was portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan, who also played Isaac Izzard in the 2018 film adaptation of The House with a Clock in its Walls. Personality Cliff Vandercave is best described as arrogant, sly, greedy, and very manipulative. He is willing do anything to get what he wants—lying or trickery, or even murder. He constantly is one step ahead of Fred, going so far as blackmailing him into firing Barney and even tricking him into firing all the other workers and framing him for embezzlement, even mocking Fred for falling into his scheme. Cliff also has no genuine loyalty to anybody but himself, as he even plans on betraying his devoted secretary Sharon Stone by taking the money for himself. When his scheme is exposed, Cliff snaps and resorts to kidnapping Pebbles and Bamm Bamm and tying them to a giant mining machine, even turning it on when Fred surrenders the Dictabird to him without any hesitation and later attempts to shoot Fred in cold blood. But when Cliff gets in a jam he can't weasel out of, he resorts to cowardly running, only for Fred to easily subdue him with one hit. All and all, Cliff's overconfidence in his lies and treachery eventually leads directly to his downfall. Biography Cliff was presumably hired by Mr. Slate some years after Fred and Barney. It is revealed that he cheated on his resume and became one of the heads of the company dishonestly. Along with Miss Stone, they decided to embezzle a fortune from the company through phony constructing machinery and fly to a beach resort called Rockopoko. All they needed was a "stooge" to put their plan into effect. Cliff is the head of the company Fred and Barney work for. Cliff proposes that he will make one worker his vice-president, if the worker wins the exam he gives them. The workers take the exam, and Barney does exceptionally well, but feeling he ought to help his friend Fred who has failed, Barney switches the tests by putting the answer slabs in the opposite envelopes. When Sharon comes in later with the test results, Cliff is shocked that Fred could win because he perceived Fred as dense and witless. But Sharon assures him that Fred would be perfect, so in the end Fred is hired. Sharon then becomes Fred's personal secretary to help seduce Fred to do Cliff's bidding including signing forged company documents. To make sure Fred would do exactly what he said, he gives him his first task of firing Barney, mainly because he got the lowest on the test. Fred at first is reluctant to obey as Barney was his best friend, but Cliff replied if Fred didn't fire him, he himself would fire both him and Barney, so in the end Fred has no choice. Later Cliff announces during a meeting that he will be making new modular housing units for the town using new age machinery that would also increase their profit margin fourfold. But Fred mistakes the tiny houses on Cliff's model of the machine for the real thing and says if he built houses this small, who would live in them. After learning from Sharon about Fred's suspicions about the new service Cliff was planning for the company, he decides to distract him with a huge bonus and tells him that if he wanted to be a top executive that he had to start living like one, which Fred does. Eventually, Cliff tricks Fred into firing all the workers in the quarry which causes a falling out with Barney, his other friends and his wife Wilma. The next morning, Fred is met with an angry crowd of employees and heads straight to the file room where he finds the real documents and discovers Cliff's true intentions and confronts him on it. Cliff tells Fred that he's given him all the credit since it was his name on the forms including spending so much money on luxuries and marks Fred as an embezzler. Fred is now a fugitive on the run who hides out at a hotel. A news broadcast is shown of Fred (or rather, an actor doing a terrible impression of him) embezzling, Wilma who is viewing this remembers the Dictabird in Fred's office and with Betty sets off to Slate & Co to clear her husband's name. Fred, who is now in a disguise, finds refuge in a cave and chats with one of the employees who was fired, but he accidentally gives himself away and a huge mob chases him down the road. Meanwhile, Wilma and Betty sneak into the office building and steal the Dictabird. However, Cliff sees Wilma and Betty leave with the Dictabird from his office window, and realizes that now that they have the bird, it would spoil everything and decided to go into another devious scheme. The angry mob soon corners Fred and attempts to hang him and Barney after he admits that it was because of him that Fred was promoted to the job, but before the two can be hanged, Wilma, Betty and the Dictabird arrive and Dictabird forces Fred to say sorry. Then the mob realizes that Cliff was the one who dismissed them and they let Fred and Barney go. With his embezzlement scheme exposed, an enraged Cliff then breaks into Fred's house and kidnaps Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, demanding the Dictabird in exchange for their safe return. Fred and Barney confront Cliff at the quarry, where he has tied Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm to a huge housing construction machine. Though they hand him the Dictabird, Cliff goes back on his word and activates the machine anyway. Barney heads to rescue the children while Fred destroys the machine. Cliff confronts Fred and attempts to shoot at him but is knocked out by Sharon, after finding out that Cliff had betrayed her by getting only one ticket to Rockapoko. Cliff tries to run away from Fred, but he picks up a large round boulder and rolls it at Cliff, knocking him to the ground like a bowling pin. But as he tries to escape the cops, a huge amount of molten cement comes down over the ledge and buries him alive, turning him into a solid statue. When Mr. Slate sees the cement-covered Cliff, he exclaims that he loves it, deciding to name it "concrete" after his daughter, Concretia, and declares the Stone Age over with its creation. Slate offers Fred the presidency of a new division in the company, but Fred turns it down in exchange for his old job back, Slate rehiring all the workers, and adding a few other improvements to the workplace he had originally desired as an executive. It is unknown if Cliff is still alive while being encased in concrete or if he suffocated since it covered his entire body with no visible holes. 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